What are the forms of these DH Lawrence Poems?
The main influence on D H Lawrence as a poet was the work of Walt Whitman. Whitman’s poems were usually free verse ‘meditations’ (a style Whitman in turn had borrowed from English seventeenth-century religious writers, like Thomas Traherne and Lancelot Andrewes). Lawrence’ ‘What would you fight for’ is a typical free-verse meditation, in the style of Whitman. Piano is more complicated. The poem is in quatrains, and rimes AABB throughout. The rhythm has close similarities with the Medieval English verse called the ‘fourteener’ (a very loose iambic heptameter), but Lawrence has broken up the base rhythm by allowing a very free substitution of dactyls for the iambs of the underlying verse. (Dactyls again are very characteristic of Whitman’s work). It is probably best to think of Piano as a hybrid verseform, with elements both of medieval English fourteener and Whitman style meditation verse. Aware is a six line stanza, rimed ABABCC. Most lines have three strong stresses around a strong me
